A pointer for the reader: the issue is Obama's decision to bomb ISIS.
A mullah speaks!
America's Moral Obligations in Iraq
Promptly criticized by another.
This Isn't a Pep Rally
Thus BooMan.
[T]hese guys [ISIS] are every bit as bad as the Khmer Rouge.
Quite possibly, they are worse.
And our country (if not our president) is just as responsible for creating the conditions that led to the Islamic State as we were for creating the conditions that led to the Khmer Rouge.
To which I responded in a comment,
Wow.
The first two sentences are false and the last is pernicious, hateful nonsense.
A personal best?
And did Beinart mean quite so unreservedly to endorse these views that he (following Samantha Power) puts into the heart of George McGovern?
Yes, he did.
Vietnam, in his mind, had been a profoundly misguided application of American might to prevent a communist-led independence movement from liberating its country from Western control. Cambodia was genocide.
In his view, the U.S. had a particular responsibility to prevent the latter because its war in Vietnam had helped cause the trauma and instability on which the Khmer Rouge seized.
As was clear back in the day, McGovern did not consider the war in Vietnam "misguided" in the same way I did, along with millions of others who no more believed in a trail of dominoes leading from Saigon to San Francisco than we did in the Tooth Fairy and bitterly resented our country forcing us into a war in which America and Americans had nothing at stake but national vanity, if even that.
Need I mention no one claimed there were dominoes leading anywhere from Cambodia?
As for blaming Nixon, Kissinger, and America for what the Khmer Rouge did to their own country, that was then and is now just liberal hate propaganda.
As Kant said of his critics' injustices, "Any stick is good enough to beat a dog with."
In my adolescence, what finally alienated me from the Church was not my atheism but its arrogant, smothering, and loathsome moral authoritarianism.
The liberals and the PC crowd are no better, really, than the Church has ever been in my lifetime, so far as that goes.
Every authoritarian imitates Procrustes.
But some of the beds fit less badly, less painfully than others, of course.
Or, if equally badly, then in a different dimension.
So, thus Beinart, approving Obama's bombing runs against ISIS.
Is there a risk that the U.S. will find itself sucked back into a costly and futile effort to impose our will on Iraq?
Perhaps, but everything we know about Barack Obama suggests he will resist that fiercely.
And so will most Americans.
It’s a risk worth taking, in part because in Iraq today, as in Southeast Asia four decades ago, we are culpable.
Were it not for our war, and the anarchy it has bred, the Yazidis would likely not be facing imminent death.
The reasons Americans want to turn away from Iraq are precisely the reasons we should not.
The interventionist propaganda industry never stops.
As for Cambodia, by the way, I was cheered later when the Vietnamese invaded and saved the country from its native rulers, though they temporarily subjected Cambodia to their own, and thus foreign, rule.
At no point did I support the idea that America should intervene, though Western control, of course, would have been better for the Cambodians - as indeed French colonialism had been better than native Communist control.
And though I blamed Kissinger for opposing the Vietnamese intervention out of deference to his new-found chums in China.
But all the same.
PS.
Shouldn't the "humanitarian interventionists" be more worried about this?
Militants Captured Iraq’s Largest Dam
Much more of a threat for many more people, though it does lack that "endangered species" frisson of imperiled Yazidis.
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